When you spend thirty years looking for a magic bean, you’re open to a helping hand when trying to find the next one. For the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, that help has arrived in the form of a crop-roving robot named Don Roverto.
The farmbot is part of Project Mineral, an endeavor from X – Google’s famous R&D subsidiary that researches challenging problems and searches for moonshots – to scale sustainable agriculture. In a blog post published today, project head Elliott Grant describes how Mineral has been assisting the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection.
From the post:
The Alliance’s team has been using Mineral’s technologies at their newly opened Future Seeds genebank in Colombia, which contains over 36,000 varieties of beans. The hope is that what the Alliance discovers with Mineral’s tools can be used to grow better beans for the world, faster.
According to Andy Jarvis, the Associate Director-General with the Alliance, the organization has spent decades building and analyzing its bean collection. Finally, after thirty years of searching, they found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics. With tools like Don Roverto, the organization can process its discoveries at lightning speed and find the next game-changing bean faster than ever before.
The rover is currently roving around the test field outside of the Alliance’s Future Seeds facility in Columbia to capture imagery of bean plants. It uses machine learning to identify characteristics such as leaf count, leaf area, leaf color, flower count, plant count and pod dimensions. Don Roverto does this for every plant in the field, so it can report how the plant has changed when it comes back the next week.
Alliance researchers say the rover is already enabling them to measure crop traits with far greater speed, frequency, and accuracy than has been possible before. For example, they can now see how a bean plant is flowering — which can help them better understand how it will cope and continue to reproduce in response to different environmental stressors, like hotter temperatures and droughts. Previously, it was nearly impossible for researchers to track this because the different components of flowering are so subtle. Now researchers can capture flowering, as it’s happening.
X’s Mineral team is continuing their work with the Alliance to better understand and map the various crops across the organization’s seed banks, but is also looking to expand their efforts with others who are interested.
You can learn more about the Mineral project and see Don Roverto roving and scanning in the video below.
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